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A label that reads 'Forging home, the migration issue'
Issue 02
Issue 02

on my

phone

on my

phone

in my

bones

in my

bones

In the notes app on my phone, a space most reserved for shopping lists, recipes, or fragments of thought, I built my own archive. In them lies the story of diasporic Palestine.

words & photography BY NOUR AL HAMMOURI
15 MIN READ
My name is Nour Al Hammouri. I was born and raised on un-ceded Bidjigal Land, and I carry with me the story of being Palestinian Australian.

I extend my respects to the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation, whose Country I now study, work, and write from. As a Palestinian, I feel deeply the parallels between the ongoing effects of British colonisation here and the long struggle for self-determination in my own homeland. I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands wherever these words may be read, and pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging.

Being 14,000 kilometres away from Palestine has fostered a particular kind of intimacy with that land. It is an intimacy born not from proximity, but from longing: love tempered by irreverence, admiration sharpened by struggle.

This digital era has allowed those of us in the diaspora to weave new forms of connection. Global networks, social platforms and private chats collapse distance, giving me space to build relationships with family overseas and Palestinians scattered across continents. Together, we maintain a presence for our cause; refusing silence, refusing erasure.

But make no mistake: to be a child of the diaspora is to wrestle with fragility. Our culture and roots are constantly pressured by forces of erasure. The Palestinian narrative is stifled, trivialised or misrepresented so often that our words become both shield and sword. We write to correct, to reframe, to insist upon our humanity.

“...though our bodies may be displaced, our pens and pixels reach back across oceans, anchoring us to the land and culture that remain at the centre of who we are.”

For me, this began in the rooms where my cultural DNA was up for debate. I was told to “downplay my Palestinian heritage,” as if its visibility were an indulgence, as if reminding others of my existence was a burden. I was assured, dismissively, that “everyone already knows.” But I will keep reminding you. My identity is not up for negotiation; my homeland’s healing is not yours to deliberate.

In the notes app on my phone, a space most reserved for shopping lists, recipes, or fragments of thought, I built my own archive. I began writing whenever the yearning for land, language, and belonging became too sharp to contain. Those digital scraps became a refuge, a way to turn ferocious yearning into words.

In them lies the story of diasporic Palestine: a space of exile and continuity, erasure and resistance, distance and intimacy. A reminder that though our bodies may be displaced, our pens and pixels reach back across oceans, anchoring us to the land and culture that remain at the centre of who we are.

The silence is deafening

At school, surrounded by peers who were mostly Muslim, my identity was never contested. I was Palestinian, and that was understood. I did not have to justify my existence or argue for my homeland’s legitimacy.

But when I stepped into university, everything shifted. In those nervous rounds of ice-breakers, my self-identification as Palestinian was too often met with apprehension, confusion, or the quiet recoil of silent opposition. Suddenly, the ground beneath me felt less certain. For the first time, my belonging required explanation.

At first, I faltered. I didn’t know how to respond to their questions, or how to disarm their doubt. It was in that dissonance that I turned to Instagram — not simply to declare who I was, but to show it. I began to share the hidden beauty of Palestine and of Palestinians: the art, the food, the music, the quiet resilience woven into our culture.

In doing so, I learned. I uncovered not only Palestine’s richness but also the scale of misinformation and distortion that surrounded its struggle. With every post I made, I confronted both my own yearning for home and the pervasive erasure of its truth.

“...in the West, only certain lives are worthy of grief – and Palestinian lives are not among them.”

The text 'Make sure to scroll within each note' and an arrow pointing rightA label that reads 'Make sure to scroll within each note!' and an arrow down
2 March 2020
Palestinian people are a living poem… we encapsulate so much beauty and tragedy and power. And yet, in unprecedented times, I have been quiet and haven’t been as vocal on Palestine as I usually am. Why? Because, I have not yet been able to find the right words to express the furore of my emotions. The disappointment I have towards the Australian government. Traipsing across my sadness in recognising my ‘friends’ have yet to post a single thing about Palestine is insurmountable.
12 May 2023
As expected, I took to my story to condemn the abhorrent assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh, the veteran Al Jazeera journalist shot dead in full press regalia. Shireen was not a bystander. She was a truth-teller, clearly marked as a member of the press, a class explicitly protected under international law. Her killing was not only a crime against a person — it was a crime against truth itself.

It is not a matter of debate: the press is protected under international law, and the killing of a journalist is a crime, full stop. Yet my words, sharpened by exhaustion and grief, were met not with outrage but with deflection. I was asked: “Why was she there?” “It’s a war zone, maybe it was a mistake.” “Did you know her?” Each question a retreat from accountability, each one exposing how little value is placed on Palestinian lives.

Shireen’s death should have shattered the world’s conscience. Instead, it exposed the truth: in the West, only certain lives are worthy of grief — and Palestinian lives are not among them.
22 March 2024
I have had enough of appealing to the so-called moral conscience of the West. The West has shown again and again that it has none. Our deaths are of no concern to them. What terrifies them is not our dying, but our resistance.

How am I meant to feel when my pride, my home, my grief are silenced by the very platforms that claim to amplify voices? When I post about Palestine, the stories often vanish, shadowed, suppressed. And so I repeat: this is why I will never stop speaking about Palestine.
8 September 2024
I come from a country that no longer exists on a map.

There is more to us than what was taken from us.

But we are more than what has been taken from us. We live in defiance of erasure, carrying our culture, our language, and our history wherever we go. Our absence from their maps will never erase our presence in the world.
2 March 2025
Story after story, post after post, reshare after reshare — my thoughts are flooded with language about “Palestinian terrorists” and “the horrors befallen at the hands of the Palestinian regime.” Yet almost never am I comforted by a truthful recognition of the Palestinian genocide or of the horrors of the Israeli apartheid regime.

And it is not just the media. It is the silence of people around me. Friends who know, who have seen, who scroll past the same images I do. They post about other causes, other injustices, but Palestine remains a void on their feeds, a void in their words. Their silence is deafening.

It should not be radical, nor political, to call for the end of occupation and apartheid. It should not take courage to affirm that Palestinian lives matter, that children deserve to live, that families deserve to stay rooted on their land. Yet in the spaces I inhabit, to say these things aloud is to risk being branded extreme, disruptive, even dangerous.

So I am left searching. Searching for fragments of truth on my Instagram stories, swiping through hundreds of posts in the hope that someone, anyone, will speak the truth out loud. I know this story is true — it is written in my bones, carried in my family’s memory, echoed across generations. And yet, because of the silence around me, I find myself craving recognition from others, as if their acknowledgement could make my truth more real.

This silence is not neutrality. It is complicity. It is the luxury of disengagement. For those of us whose homeland is denied, whose existence is erased, silence cuts deeper than lies.

Neither here nor there

Living in so-called Australia, this settler colony that cloaks itself in the rhetoric of multiculturalism, you inevitably assume a culture not entirely your own. It creeps in, this new identity, quietly demanding space, while your heritage is left to simmer in the background of other people’s minds, half-forgotten, half-exoticised.
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For me, there was always the fear of losing touch. A fear that my culture, my language, my homeland, would dissolve if I let it. That fear is what pushed me into literature - into the works of Khalid Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Rabih Alameddine’s Hakawati, and Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent. These books cracked open the experiences of diasporic children like myself; children who orbit between cultures, living in the space of in-betweenness, forever negotiating belonging.
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Australia lauds itself as a diverse, multicultural nation. Yet the performance of such diversity is often shallow, its gestures lacklustre. The country has not truly moved on from its foundations in assimilation and cultural erasure. That history has simply been repackaged and exported into the lives of all who navigate identity here, reverberating in 2025 as much as it did in the century before.
The text 'Make sure to scroll within each note' and an arrow pointing rightA label that reads 'Make sure to scroll within each note!' and an arrow down
11 February 2019
My trauma is of a different kind. It is intertwined with the pain of absence. A severing from homeland, a disconnect from culture, people and history. It is a feeling that reverberates and is echoed by the more than six million diaspora Palestinians living out their existential displacement.  

I think compounded with being a third culture child it becomes harder. I completely devote myself to learning Palestinian culture, art, history, traditions, literature (in English) and I become experienced in it through first hand experiences but I don’t feel it. It’s difficult to explain but I wish I could say I actually feel Palestinian and Australian. Instead of neither. I don’t truly feel like a Palestinian nor do I feel like I’m truly Australian. There is a disconnect. And I’ll tell you where it lies.
23 September 2019
Identity was never meant to feel this complicated. Yet I find myself caught in conversations and encounters that make it so.

“Oh, you’re different.”

“You’re a good Muslim, not like the others.”

“Are you French? Spanish? Mexican?”

“You don’t look Arab.”

“Not what I expected from the west [of Sydney].”

“You’re too fallet (direct translation: loose contextual translation: progressive).”
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“Wait—you’ve actually been to Palestine?”
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Each question, each comment, each half-compliment twists into a reminder that I do not fit cleanly anywhere. I am always “other,” always explained back to myself in someone else’s words.
19 January 2023
I move through spaces with ease, until my name is spoken, until my details are revealed. I have been stopped by the police and treated casually, even warmly, until my licence surfaced a truth they hadn’t expected. I am liked, even embraced, until people scroll my Instagram and find the two flags in my bio, jarring them into recognition that I am “other.”
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Racism has met me everywhere from non-Muslim schools where I was too Arab, and to Islamic schools where I was too progressive, too different, not Arab enough.
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This hybrid grants me invisibility, but never belonging. It shields me in one moment only to expose me in the next. It is not safety, only silence.
10 February 2024
The incantatory performatives of colonialist rhetoric transmogrify me into something other than I am. A collage of a broken boy from a land far away, unknown to many, a fantasy. And I don't think this is an experience applicable strictly to Palestinians. It's any third culture child.

“This hybrid grants me invisibility, but never belonging. It shields me in one moment only to expose me in the next. It is not safety, only silence.”

The text 'Make sure to scroll within each note' and an arrow pointing rightA label that reads 'Make sure to scroll within each note!' and an arrow down
30 May 2024
The most hurtful part is never feeling at home anywhere on the globe. The supposed safe spaces are everything and anything but. There is this crisis of identity born out of the struggle of reconciling two cultures, a crisis that is seemingly only becoming more prevalent, or at least more expressed.

If our forefathers belonged to a place, then does that automatically mean that we belong to it too? Is identity something as flat as a birth certificate and passport that says where you are from? I believe that identity is more multi-layered than that. It involves where your parents are from, but it shouldn’t be the sole definition of it. Identity is more unique, more personal.
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Being a third culture child is, in truth, to be from nowhere and everywhere at once. Today, I recognise myself as a blend of the cultures that shaped me. I have grown to see my identity not as fracture, but as multiplicity. We, third culture children, are not rootless, we are expansive. We are open-minded, adaptable, and uniquely positioned to move through the world.
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This label 'third culture kid’ is both the complication and the gift of my life. And in embracing it, I have come to see not only the burden of in-betweenness, but its power.
30 May 2024
In Australia, I blend. I am read as “Australian” until my name transforms me into something else: an exotic creature with syllables too hard, too foreign, too long to pronounce. In Palestine, the irony deepens. I could pass as Palestinian in appearance, but my clothes, my mannerisms, my fractured speech betray me as ajnabee – a foreigner.
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Hybrids are unfettered and uncharted waters. Something new, something yet to be charted, understood and appreciated.
2 June 2024
Have I found spaces where I can be me, as I am. A combobulation of a white passing Palestinian Australian? Not really. I have to physically demarcate myself - be one or the other in many spaces. The ‘safe spaces’ are rare, and appreciated as they come. Being Palestinian-Australian is hard for me to identify as. It's too convoluted. To me it means I am both, equally. Which I’m not. I shift transiently between the two when it suits. A different Nour presents himself depending on the circumstances.

To insist to exist

To be Palestinian is to live with a paradox: to carry a homeland that is both vivid and invisible. The land exists, the people exist, the culture thrives, but the world has conspired to erase us from its maps, from its narratives, from its conscience. This is not merely symbolic. It shapes every aspect of diasporic life.

When your country is not recognised, the ground beneath you feels perpetually unstable. You are always being asked to prove, to explain, to justify. You are placed in a world that insists you exist only as absence, as erasure. And yet, we insist back. We write, we speak, we live out loud, because to do anything less would concede to a silence that has already taken too much.

"To be Palestinian is to live with a paradox: to carry a homeland that is both vivid and invisible"

The text 'Make sure to scroll within each note' and an arrow pointing rightA label that reads 'Make sure to scroll within each note!' and an arrow down
20 March 2022
The stifled rights of Palestinians and the bloody events we witnessed in Palestine have made me lose my respect for my adopted homeland “Australia”. It has made such a resounding fall from grace in my eyes that leaves me no room to deny my emotions or delude myself. If your homeland doesn't stand by you or feel for you, then what use is it?
20 March 2022
Being Palestinian in a world that no longer wants to recognise your country is hard, and for that I will never shut up about being Palestinian, and to those that it bothers … you know how to unfollow.
3 January 2025
Palestine is one of the toughest contemporary issues, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for themselves, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.
19 March 2025
The crux of our discomfort lies in the miasma of being gaslit, subjugated to being discounted as a terrorist and expected to answer for the crimes of people you have no connection to. The obfuscation of being a Palestinian and being a terrorist has caused great grief for many. For some unexpected reason the simple fact to being a Palestinian has created this exodus of name calling and labelling. Bar being innocent amongst the claims being thrown about rather gun-ho the space for constructive conversation and dialogue has ceased to exist. All the above contributes to a greater feeling of distrust and discomfort.
Nour Al Hammouri
Nour Al Hammouri is a Palestinian Australian writer and law student based in Sydney. Their work explores identity, displacement, and the politics of silence surrounding Palestine. A former student leader and advocate, Nour writes at the intersection of law, justice, and belonging — where personal memory meets public conscience.
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